Climate change, hurricanes and the hazards of connecting dots [Opinion] Is Hurricane Florence our fault for emitting climate-changing greenhouse gases, or perhaps policy makers fault for allowing us to do so?

Or hey, maybe its an act of nature that is no more intense or potentially destructive than millions of similar weather events that have occurred throughout millions of eons before today. Given that the last 40 years of rising atmospheric CO2 have actually coincided with a period of record-low hurricane and tornadic activity in the Western hemisphere, the thought that any random hurricane event is somehow our fault is so utterly absurd that it borders on a true mental disorder.

No one would have ever dreamed that the ed board at the Houston Chronicle could outdo all the fake news hacks at CNN to win this particular prize, but lets just call it a real Cinderella story, because the entire piece is a fairy tale.

The problem with all these categories  All that having been said, Florence is a nasty, nasty storm that is going to cause all sorts of major damage along the coasts of North and South Carolina and well inland. As I type this Im watching residents there telling news people they plan to ride this one out. Good god, people, what are you thinking about?

Well, one of the things they may be thinking about is the fact that  as happens so often with these storms  Florence has now been downgraded twice in the last 24 hours. It began Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, but was downgraded to a Cat 3 at mid-afternoon. Overnight, it was downgraded once again to a Cat 2 storm, with sustained winds of 110 miles per hour.

That is the problem with this whole category ranking system for these storms  as the storms make their final approaches to land and typically weaken as they get into more shallow waters, the downgrading of them can lull residents into a false sense of security. People tend to forget that, when it made landfall, Hurricane Katrina was a Category 1 storm, having been downgraded three times in the 48 hours before it came ashore. Everyone who stayed in New Orleans to ride this one out regretted doing so.

My wife and I rode out Hurricane Ike at our home in Houston, 50 miles inland, in 2008. Ike was also a Cat 1 storm when it made landfall. That was a mean and nasty storm that took all afternoon and all night to pass through our city. We awoke the next morning to find downed trees and power lines throughout our neighborhood, and the 100 year-old home behind us completely totaled by a 60 foot-tall pecan tree the storm had uprooted and deposited in its living room.

That Cat 1 hurricane completely inundated Galveston Island, causing the worst flooding there since the Great Storm of 1900, which killed more than 8,000 residents. Ike also left hundreds of thousands of residents without power for days, tens of thousands for weeks and even months before the areas electricity was fully restored.

Last years Hurricane Harvey was just barely a hurricane at all when it made landfall, but the fact that it lingered along the Texas Gulf Coast dumping prodigious amounts of rain for several days ended up making it the most costly hurricane in American history in terms of the cost of damages due to all the flooding it caused. Given that the projected path for Florence is quite similar to that we saw from Harvey, anyone living near the coast who sticks around to ride this one out is literally placing their lives at risk.

At any rate, while the utility of this category system for hurricane trackers and scientists is easy to grasp, perhaps something different should be used to describe the storms when communicating with the public, given that so many of them end up being downgraded rapidly as they approach the coast. Because it really doesnt matter how fast their winds are blowing when theyre 500 miles out to sea. What matters is how theyre going to kill you when they get over land.

Just a thought.

Man, nobody couldve seen that one coming. Oh, wait  Washingtons Evergreen State College, which has notoriously become the higher education poster child for obnoxious leftism, reported a catastrophic drop in new enrollments for its fall semester. Go figure.

Thats quite an a achievement in a U.S. senate that includes the likes of Cory Booker, Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Bill Nelson, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Manchin.  Becket Adams, writing in the Washington Examiner, reports that California Senator Kamala Harris is rapidly gaining a reputation as the most dishonest senator. Which of course means she will make the perfect Democrat nominee for the presidency in 2020.

Never, ever doubt that Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.  So, lets say youre a longtime sociology professor at a minor college in Las Vegas. And lets say that you, like pretty much every other sociology professor in America, hate President Donald Trump, because of course you do. And lets say you want to find some way to express your hatred of President Trump  what do you do?

Why, if you are Sociology Professor Mark J. Bird, you shoot your own self in your own freakin arm! I swear I do not make this stuff up. Who could?

Just another day in fake hurricane news and Trump Derangement Syndrome America.

"The hurricane rating system is misleading, based on wind speed. The danger from hurricanes mostly is not wind but water. "

It is a wind rating, which is much more meaningful than the gobbledegook dreamed up by stupid reporters.

It's very meaningful to ships. It was originated by a guy studying the effectiveness of cheap low income housing (which is relatively inexpensive to make water-proof, but more expensive to make structurally sound in high winds).

Having lived my entire life on the Gulf Coast it is painfully obvious by now that NO ONE takes these ersatz 'forecasters' seriously. They WANT people perpetually afraid of every gust of wind and drop of rain. How long have we heard cries of doom over 'CAT 3-4-5', now it seems the Category doesn't matter. Not when their week long hype of Cat-4-5 is falling apart. They MUST be right. There MUST be a catastrophe! Sure there will probably be a lot of rain, and maybe some flooding, but this will NOT be a monster Cat 4-5. I heard last nite it might be a DEPRESSION when it hits the coast! I don't consider anyone with a degree in meteorology earned in the past 20 years to be credible. It's all about face time and ratings and POWER to make millions run when ordered. Not a scientist among them. Without their computers they know less than we do. Why- will someone tell me- if the data fed to these computer programs is the same, hard facts, do all these computer models differ? You can't even trust the radar they DO allow you to see. The color is manipulated. Green now means NO rain and red does not mean it's storming. So what can we believe? The credibility of weather forecasting is almost nil, and dwindling. People stay when told to evacuate because they KNOW the doom and gloom forecasters are almost always wrong. So, SOMETIMES, people die because these Doom Buffoons name any bunch of thunderstorms and pull out ever adjective in the dictionary to hype them even after it's obvious reality is not complying. Watch, long after Flo has gone inland ANY rain in Kansas will be 'Florence devastating the wheat fields! It has to stop. Hype has to stop. Jobs must be lost. 'Fake news' has nothing on fake weather. Everyone-get a degree in meteorology . Accuracy not expected as long as you can write a good script and look good on air. Job for life!

19
posted on 09/13/2018 6:31:42 AM PDT
by ClearBlueSky
(ISLAM is the problem. ISLAM is the enemy of civilization.)

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